Liked everything about it, but the character left/right walking movement is too slow.
Reviews for "Tattle & Tale"
SinclairStrange responds:
I'd suggest downloading the windows version, from itch.io, it runs much much smoother :) (As it wasn't originally designed for flash)
The spirit of spyro lives on yet. This game struck my nostalgia bone harder and harder the more I played it. If this isn't textbook spyro 2 influence I don't know what is. My nostalgia bone may very well be obliterated with so many things that resonated in this piece. However, onto the bad news.
Tired upon playing and writing this, so maybe I'm biased, but I found the piece itself to be fairly dry. But in the 2 levels I cleaned out before putting this piece down, I did a lot of thinking about what was wrong and what was right.
Primarily, I think it came down to pacing and movement speed. The game itself had a very slow pace in terms of movement and slow, low-risk combat. Combined with the "collectathon" aspect (a pejorative in its own right in the realm of gaming, if only for reasons I may never understand), it really did kill the pacing and make things feel tedious.
I'd also point out that the levels were perhaps overly dependent on verticality. I love me some verticality, and one should use it to properly appreciate gliding, but I think it just doesn't work in a 2d setting as much as a 3d setting. Wherein vertical terrain is not used for mounting a chain of terrain displaced from the rest of the level, but rather strewn on top the ground of a level and made mandatory to re-climb a large chain of 2d terrain upon falling down or missing something at one spot. Dare I say, it just doesn't work outside of a 3d realm for the lack of non-linearity one could imbue into 3d.
Further, most enemies seemed bland, and a couple of the NPC's had somewhat annoying sounds for speaking, and the speaking range was so high you'd hop between L/R platforms and have the effect resound every second or so. Painful, in its own way. About the enemies, I always loved how in spyro, with some exceptions, enemies seemed specialized in their attack style and how each had weaknesses and strengths, as well as more diverse movement patterns on occasion that could keep you on your toes in combat. Meanwhile, most of the foes presented seem to be pretty linear and "idle" in terms of routing, while often just being some kind of critter.
Let's move onto the good news: The game functions without any true bugs I can find. It has a nice setting that is generic while a thing its own at the same time, oddly spinning the old record in a new direction. The game looks great, its soundtrack has some nice and very creatively stitched together jams, and all the core mechanics are there while platforming.
For 2d, I feel that mario and sonic realized or built around some of the potential faults at hand.
Not to be a completionist collectathon or to mandate the player to move in all sorts of areas requiring backtracking and climbing, but leaving them as options with large incentives in terms of rewards. You could blow past tedious 2d terrain in a more reflex oriented manner rather than pure coordination, often times. More unique encounters, be they level or boss, would gradually require more coordination over reflex, or rather along side it. In that sense, it was challenging and skill related, while fast paced and not requiring too much time investment.
I love what is inherited in this game, and how it is unique in many fashions. It has an artistically thrilling world, but a functionally dry one. It pains me to say that I'd rate this somewhere in the vicinity of 7/10, PROBABLY leaning towards 4/5 due to how close it is to being a magical product in its inception. I hope my criticisms can help improve and see things a bit better for you, or at least that I didn't shit all over your day at the least.
A very tough call for a very thin line that barely remains uncrossed. Keep on rocking, because you've clearly got a lot going in terms of elements, and I've seen you produce some fiercer content before.
~WCCC
SinclairStrange responds:
Thanks for a wonderful review! I complete agree in some aspects with the design point of view, however as this was created for a gamejam (and I only had a month) I really didn't have much time to plan out everything as I would of liked. I actually had lots of neat ideas to try and keep things more fresh but just didn't have the time to create and build them. I originally wanted the worlds to be all interconnected and have sub areas but that would of just been too much of a task.
Same with the enemies, to program in 20 plus unique enemies would of just been too much for the time scale I had so I just made 5 different types and re-skinned them with different sprites. A bit lazy approach but at the same time it saved me time to work on other stuff. The music itself was all created on the last day, in under 3 hours I think, so that just shows how pushed for time I was.
The movement and pace is only an issue in the flash version because it wasn't planned to be ported over here, it was originally made for PC's. Flash is a bit of a resource hog and I'm shocked it even runs to be honest!
Hopefully when I get around to making a spiritual successor I'll make sure I plan it using flash and iron out all the bugs and have more time to create more clever world designs :D
I think I found a glitch. In Magma Marsh there was no exit. After finding all the gems and souls I still couldn't find an exit. After I ran the race challenge the character got stuck slowly jumping up and down on the chest while creating hundreds of "fragments".
SinclairStrange responds:
My bad, when shuffling around stuff for flash port I forgot to re-add that stuff back in and fix it up. It should be hopefully all there and fixed :D
Wonderfull! I just love these original side scrollers!
Those soulwings are the cutest solution to double-jumping ever. Duality of character is kinda cool. Movement could be faster.
SinclairStrange responds:
Downloading the offline standalone PC version should fix movement issues. :)